


Dead and Buried

by catisacat



Category: Borderlands
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 07:13:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8614585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catisacat/pseuds/catisacat
Summary: Jack never really thought about how little time he got to spend with Nisha until it was too late.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I finally write a male/female pairing and she's fuckin' dead in it. Good job, Cat. A+.
> 
> Anyways, I was always disappointed that they made Nisha and her relationship with Jack such a toss away so have some weird, theoretical "what if they'd actually developed this relationship at all?"
> 
> Also my first fanfic featuring Handsome Jack as anything but a background antagonist.

Every second Jack spent on this miserable planet was a stark reminder of how much he’d love to moonshot it into oblivion.

But he couldn’t do that, he had business to attend to.

Pulling the purple sheriff’s hat lower on his own head he walked into the dirty, dangerous town of Lynchwood.

He’d never understood why Nisha had insisted on living down here when she could have been up on Helios with him. At least, to some degree. Part of him always knew it was pointless to try and control her. Nisha does what Nisha wants.

He groaned as he adjusted her dead weight against him. She’d always been surprisingly heavy for being so thin and her lifeless body was no exception.

Moving her caused another small rush of blood, leaking onto his jacket.

Usually Jack was a fan of being covered in blood but not like this.

He’d thankfully gotten to her body before the Rakks could get at it but things rot quickly down on Pandora. A hundred bullet wounds had all but turned her into swiss cheese. It had made transporting her like this a nightmare. She’d long since soaked through the thick tarp his subordinates had given him.

Plus the stench was unimaginable. He knew the smell of death well but something about its source being a loved one made it all the worse.

Couldn’t remember feeling this alone either, not since he was a young boy. He was normally swarmed by underlings, ripe for the stress relief pickings. Part of him wished he HAD brought someone with. If only to clock them right in the jaw whenever he felt like.

Many had actually protested him going alone to Pandora. They had met untimely ends.

He knew he had to do this alone.

The town of Lynchwood was completely wiped out. Were Nisha still alive and kicking she honestly would have loved the future ghost town vibe it was putting off.

Those goddamn bandits didn’t leave a single midget unexploded. He stepped over a dead badass, downed by a single shot to the temple. Marauders shredded to pieces. Burnt corpses of nomads.

Vault Hunters truly are the worst bandits of all.

Looking down at the limp, lifeless hand of his once girlfriend he felt his blood boil.

It fizzled out quickly. Now wasn’t the time for that. Store it, Jackie, store it for later. Then you can strangle the life out of those lowlife bandits. Really savor it. Make it last.

Right now he had something much less pleasurable to attend to.

He carefully placed Nisha’s body on the ground, right underneath her favorite gallows. Reaching up he took her hat off his head and rested it on her stomach. Or roughly where her stomach should be under there.

The feeling of a shovel in his hands felt foreign. He hadn’t done manual labor since he escaped his abusive grandmother way back when. Hell, the last thing he buried was his cat she’d drowned.

Uncomfortable deja vu washed over him. He looked back at Nisha. The tarp had unwrapped a little. Just enough to expose her bloodied face with those once vibrant yellow eyes now dull and lifeless.

He swore loudly and hit the wooden gallows with the shovel and all his might.

Several Rakk took off as he continued to throw a fit, cursing and flailing the impromptu weapon around wildly.

After a few minutes of this he collapsed flat on his ass.

“Sorry, Nish, you shouldn’t have to see that,” he muttered to her corpse as he crawled over and covered her face again.

He sighed heavily before standing up again, angrily brushing his pants off before stabbing the shovel into the hard, compact ground, “Why’d you want to live on this crap planet anyways?! I could have given you anything. Everything. Helios is a paradise, no freaking Vault Hunters, no bandits, no-”

He squawked as he looked up, right into the sun, “NO STUPID JACKHOLE SUN!”

Panting and sweating. He couldn’t remember the last time he sweated like this. He tried futilely to wipe his face on his sleeve he looked back at her again, “There’s independence and then there’s stupidity, sweetheart. You started leaning the other way when you didn’t listen to me.”

Tossing the dirt over his shoulder he continued his pointless monologue to a dead woman, “Thought you’d get it when Wilhelm died. I did that, you know, but still. Stakes were getting higher, payouts getting lower. Should have listened to me.”

More dirt flew, “Why didn’t you listen to me?”

He looked around fiercely making sure he was alone before unlatching his mask. Went at it like a panicked animal, trying to get the goddamn sweat off his face before he’d have to cover it again. It was sticky and awful as he refitted it, ”Augh… maybe should have listened to you too… you always did think my scar was sexy… sexier than sweating to death in this freaking mask...”

Just had to get this over with. He started digging harder and faster, ignoring the aching in his aging limbs as he feverishly worked. God, he felt old. He’d never really thought about the fact he’d recently turned fifty until now.

Not that the grave wasn’t dug in record time nonetheless. He’s not in his prime but he’s still a crazy strong dude. For some reason. Even though he’s supposedly a computer programmer.

Surveying his work he figured this was deep enough. It’d been over his head when he was in there so it had to be somewhere around six feet deep. Been a bitch to climb out of. Some dark corner of his mind had made a joke about being glad Nisha was dead so she couldn’t see the awkward disgrace he’d made of himself trying to crawl out of the deep hole.

Lowering Nisha into the grave was the easy part. Physically, at least. He planted a kiss on the top of her head before trying to lower her as gently as possible.

The tarp fell off as she dropped the last few feet though, fully exposing her bloodied and battered body. It wasn’t until now he noticed that there were also deep gashes, one particularly nasty one nearly severing one of her arms. Some odd blue burns twisted around her in places, acutely reminding him of his own scar. Not to mention the familiar sight of buzzsaw wounds nearly made him throw up.

He stepped away from the edge for a while, nearly hyperventilating as he propped himself up on a metal sign.

Shaking his head he approached the grave again, scooping up the forgotten sheriff’s hat and holding it over his heart.

“Guess I’m supposed to say somethin’ now right?”

Her mangled body gave no answer.

“Alrighty then… Nish… Nisha. I knew from the moment I saw you that I was gonna make you mine. In the least creepy way possible.”

He knew this was already bad. He can’t fuck this up. Gotta get it right.

“Scratch that, that eulogy sucks. Gimmie a sec, Nish…”

Lowering his head he searched for words he should have worked on while he dug this grave. He’d been pointedly ignoring it though, he didn’t want to think about this. It made him almost miss the manual labor of digging the grave.

After a few moment he started again.

“Nisha Kadam. You were easily the most pants-crappingly terrifying woman I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. The fear you could strike into a bandit with little more than a glance was inspiring.”

As his voice hitched slightly he knew he’d made the right choice by insisting on going it alone.

“I’m gonna miss you, Nish. We never got enough time together. Now we never will.”

A single, strangled sob escaped him.

Fuck it, that was good enough. He tossed her hat on top of her body before he started shoveling the dirt back over her.

He almost welcomed this grueling manual labor if it would keep his mind off of her.

The sun slowly set as he finished, drowning him in the suffocating golden hue of a Pandoran twilight.

Carefully, he tamped down the earth, moving around plants and debris to make the area look like it hadn’t been touched. Didn’t need those goddamn psycho bandits digging her up and parading her dead body around like a sick trophy.

He took one look back at the grave as he slowly walked away, serenaded by the distant screams of a dying Skag.

Maybe if there was another side, he’d see her again.

**Author's Note:**

> As always check out my other stuff at [catisacat](http://www.catisacat.tumblr.com/)


End file.
